When did you get "the talk?"

Funny thing, I don't remember when I learned about sex. It kind of just clicked for me that if you insert a penis into a vagina, you can impregnate a woman. I remember paying attention to puberty class in 5th grade and learning about hormones and sweating and crap, but nothing about pregnancy.

My parents never told me about sex, and I never asked them.

So... I don't know. I probably learned it from the internet or from another friend in school.

 

My parents never really gave me a sex talk ever. In fact, I never even bothered to come out to my parent's really since it's pretty obvious. It was sort of just assumed, at least for me. My brother did get a sex talk and he did have a rather dramatic coming out and I tried very hard to avoid that. But funny story.

The only thing that comes close to that, for me, was when my mom caught me sneaking my first somewhat boyfriend out of the house bright and early at 7:00AM on a Saturday morning. We were coming down a flight of stairs and she was waiting for us at the bottom near the kitchen, eating cereal. We totally surprised her. She sort of just stared at me. We looked at her.

I said, "Uh, Mom..this is Preston. I'm going to take him back to school now." He lived on campus, we were both undergraduates at the time. My mom just said ok and left, and I mostly just wanted to melt into the floor. It was made even more awkward by him and was made 10x worse, because he was starring in The Mystery of Edwin Drood at the time and had 18th century facial hair, like full mutton chops. When I got back she tried to give me the talk but I ran back upstairs and she shouted after me that she hoped I used protection at least. It's not awkward now though. My mom knows that I have an open relationship and that my boyfriend and I have had threesomes in the past. When she hears these things she just says, "You kids." And sort of rolls her eyes, sometimes she makes jokes about it.

I think the more important thing is creating an atmosphere of non-judgement and open-mindedness, because you can't realistically cover sex and all of its components in just one talk. Sex evolves. Sexual appetites will evolve.

 

Had the typical terrible sex ed in school... I suppose it started some of the kids thinking about it, but really, it was public school sex ed. So not helpful. My mom's said she tried to talk with us about both puberty and sex, but I don't recall this happening at all. She said I more or less ran away screaming... but I was slightly more receptive when she left us with some age-appropriate books.

I agree with Kidd; you can't cover everything in one conversation. I say just cover the basics, and let them know you're open to talk if they have questions at some later point. I am also going to be an advocate of the book approach for kids who, like me, had no interest in learning this stuff or discussing it with a parent, lol.

As far as timing, I've heard middle schoolers can get into some wild things these days, which I don't recall being the case when I was that age. So I think it'd depend on the kid, whenever they seem to be getting curious.

 

My Mum did, a year after my school did (no one had told her we had had it).

 

I never did. lol I don't even know how I learned about sex at such a young age honestly.

 

I was in the car driving home with my father. I think I was 8 or 9 years old?
I sort of already knew by my brain having connected animal reproduction to humans.

I watched a documentary when I was younger about elephants and it included a detailed explanation about their reproduction and everything. My sister said a statement about pregnancy and though I was much younger than her, I recall saying a fact about how babies were made or something. Her reaction was hilarious. "How on EARTH do you know that?"

 

Learned it myself, essentially.

I think I learned about it over a period of time gradually. My Brothers and I have had access to Internet since quite young. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but the subject started cropping up on the Internet and when my parents would occasionally say something hinting. Already hinted to its existence in some way or another, eventually I just began looking into everything to know about sex, pregnancy, et cetera, and put pieces together and picked up very fast on everything. At probably a surprising young age, I could easily register almost any if not any sexual comment/gesture no matter how subtle from then forth.

 

I figured everything out by myself, as far as I can remember.

I think kids nowadays have access to such amount of information, we must give classes for this matter at schools, just when kids hit puberty or even earlier. I get so annoyed when parents whine that this education will 'damage' their kids. It's a little bit too late, they got all information from their environment, internet etc.. our job is to teach them how to process all that information, give them education about protection and dangers.

 

My parents gave me a book called "the dictionary of sex" or something ridiculous and I told them I read it... but I didn't XD;;; My school also had an abstinence only policy that, for whatever reason, also didn't really go into women's health at all... When I got my period, I literally thought I was dying and was worried about how to tell my parents about it, but then I remembered a scene from Blue Lagoon where the dying mother told her daughter, "You'll know you've become a woman when you wake up and find blood on your sheets" or something to that effect... I didn't know anything beyond that, so I told my mother, "I think I've become a woman." x.x;;;

This also led to me really not knowing anything about anything and learning everything from a stalker who always told me sex things and from guys I met online and irl... In college, a guy I knew literally just whipped his member out when I said I hadn't ever seen one... it was... quite frightening @.@;;;;

Tl;dr... parents, please teach your kids about sex so they don't end up in weird situations like this ;.;

 

Never.. and although we had some sex ed in school it wasn't something I usually bothered going to. Everything I know, I picked up from the internet, books, magazines, peers and other sources.

I remember when I was about 11, my cousin was living with us for a while and I found some of his porno magazines.. it was mostly just ladies showing off their private areas. I thought it was absolutely vile, lol.

 

My parents kind of told me different stuff as it came up on the news, or just in conversation when I got old enough. I think that's a good way of doing it.

At school we had a Sex Education day when I was in Year 6 (age 10-11) and we learned about pregnancy and some stuff about puberty. Not much detail though. There was a Sex Education afternoon in Year 5 (age 9-10) but even though they called it Sex Education it had nothing to do with sex and was just a lady coming in to talk about washing your hands, face, etc and we used a UV pen to see how well we had washed our hands.

Now I'm in high school we have Citizenship twice a fortnight and we cover, among others, things like puberty, sexual health, pregnancy, relationships.

 

Only one family talk that I recall, and that was with my mother. I think it was reaction to some question I asked about how children are born or some such thing. This took place in 6th grade. It was probably very much along the lines of "when a couple love each other, they get married, and when they decide to have a baby..." There was no hint that sex was anything more than procreation. Plus some useful details were left out. I had the vision that the penis went into the vagina flaccid. This was strange, since I was having erections, and one would think I could have connected the dots.

Sex ed took place in 7th grade, although my mother had me pulled. Not entirely sure why--maybe she felt it was too young. 8th grade was only about STDs. And then sex ed in 9th grade, which was pretty dull.

I also recall a book that "mysteriously" appeared in a pile of books my mother grabbed for me at a book sale. I thought then it was an accident. Now, I wonder if it wasn't intentional. The book was too advanced, really--it was more aimed at adults--although the title might have sounded like something for teenagers ("Young adult" was part of the title.) This took place maybe when I was 14 or 15.

Between 9th grade sex ed & that book, I managed to get at least a basic understanding.

Needless to say, there was little or nothing on LGBT issues. For that matter, masturbation was not something that ever got discussed. I did it, of course, and when I learned the word (maybe 9th grade?), I realized that's what I've been doing all these years.

Masturbation did get mentioned only once in sex ed. (I was responsible for that. We had an anonymous question box. I couldn't resist putting in a question: "What is masturbation?" One other guy in the class couldn't believe anyone asked.)

 

Who knows when the old folks tried, can't remember. What I do remember were books at the library, or at home, and I got all my stuff from them. Very good books, and they complemented each other.
I had no need to get any kind of 'talk' or exchange 'secrets' or 'theories' about sex with anyone.

We had some stupid 4-5 hours at school about the mechanical and biological part of the business. Must have been 12 or 13. It was a complete waste of time : I had read all the stuff they mentioned years ago. Everyone was giggling. The teacher was so embarrassed, I felt bad for him. I knew also everybody was embarrassed.

When should you 'talk about it' to a kid? I think it's best to leave books around, and try to answer the questions when (and if) they are asked directly to you. Same as you do with the rest of the topics. Takes the pressure off you and off the kid, by turning 'the talk' into something that both parties really want to talk about.
Otherwise it's pretty much you imposing 'the talk' on the kid.

 

Never! I learned everything along the way.
When I was 7 I remember a classmate said she caught her grandparents having sex. At the time I didn't have the slightest idea what sex was. So the rest of the day I asked everyone I came into contact with. I got many interesting responses, all from kids my age. Then finally at home I asked my parents and they said we were going to have a discussion and I didn't like their tone. So then I was afraid, and I never got the talk.
Now I'm a giant prude. :lol:

 

Still haven't hah. I guess my parents figured me too intelligent? idfk

 

My parents never really gave me "the talk", but I did learn about that kind of thing in sex Ed. We did about puberty fairly early on in Primary school and early secondary school, so that was pretty well covered.

The main part of sex ed. was covered on this "extracurricular health day" we had in which we did about drugs, rape and abuse, and sex. It was a pretty downbeat day but they are important subjects to cover so I can't exactly complain.

We didn't really have a proper sex ed instructor, instead we got our homophobic science teacher teach us about this stuff. woo...

We did about contraception, not sleeping around, and saving yourself for marriage mostly. First off we got to do a chemical experiment that went kinda wrong. You see, we were given two types of solutions. One to represent females and the other to represent males. We were given sheets explaining different scenarios for fictional study cases, and each container had a name like "Alice" or something.

We were told to only mix the female solutions with the male ones specifically. However, I think quite a few of the female solutions got mixed with both male and female and vice versa. So when it got to the end on the experiment, the teachers were baffled as they had never seen the result creating such colours before until people came clean about mixing some of the female solutions with female solutions and the male with male when they were asked about it. The others shook their heads at our set of groups because they had ended up with the right concentration in their solutions. It was kinda funny to see how Alice had ended up sleeping with pretty much everyone theoretically (even the ones who were positive) and ended up being a yellowy green that would technically pass as being clean yet the whole point of the experiment was to show how it's a bad idea to sleep around.

Somebody in our class struck up the nerve to ask about having safe sex in same-sex relationships, and our teacher just laughed and asked "why, are you gay?". He squirmed in his seat a little and slouched a little as the rest of the class laughed. "No.. I just wondered that's all" he replied to the teacher.

His advice was basically "If you can help it, don't have gay sex in the first place because gay sex is pointless". :eusa_doh: So I guess EC health sections have been my main source of information really on this kind of thing. Um yeah...

 

After I got my first period, at age nine, my mom told me "how babies are made." When I was 10, I was given a book called What's Happening To My Body? Book For Girls. It was very informative on puberty and sex. Interestingly enough, it was also very liberal and mentioned oral sex and sex between two of the same gender both as acceptable.

 

My parents never gave it to me. I suppose it's a good thing I'm gay, because I know next to nothing about the female side of reproduction.

 

I didn't. I learned everything from the internet and from friends. No-one ever sat me down and explained anything until I was 12, and by that time, I knew all the basics anyway. Maybe if my parents had spoken to me about it, I'd feel less awkward talking to them about my sexuality and relationships